Nobody Has Their Pulse on the Youth of America like NBC!

First NBC replaces Jay Leno with Jimmy Fallon and now this -- not since the days of Laugh-In has the network seen such a youthful infusion. "MSNBC Now Uses 4-Year-Old Daughter of Anchor To Push For Gay Marriage,"Newsbusters reports. (According to this Hot Air headline, she's five years old.) As Allahpundit writes, "I hope they keep this up and expand it to other hot-button issues. I’d be awfully curious to see what a five-year-old thinks of, say, abortion:"

“Billy, would you be excited if your mommy said you were going to have a little brother? But what if mommy was sad about that? You don’t want mommy to be sad, do you? You’d support mommy if she asked the doctor to vacuum your brother out of her belly, wouldn’t you? Sure you would.”

Serious question, though: while there’s something undeniably adorable about a mother and child shooting the breeze, conversations very much like this one will inevitably be taking place in public school classrooms across the country if (when?) same-sex marriage is legalized nationally. What happens when Ellas and their little friends answer the question, “What is marriage,” incorrectly? Our guess? It won’t go as smoothly as this 3-minute segment.

For the first several decades of its existence, NBC was the home of sober news readers such as John Cameron Swayze, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw. For the most part, they were earnest reactionary liberals, but they were grownups who took the news seriously. As I've asked before, what on earth -- or perhaps we should look to some other planet -- has gotten into the network and its spinoff channel in recent years?